Training Mania

I got some great news this week - I'm going to GAETC! I have always enjoyed this state conference. The presenters are very knowledgeable and share some great new items and tricks of the trade. netTrekker will of course have a booth, so I'll work that some, but I also get to attend some of the wonderful sessions. YEAH! (I even enjoyed this conference more than my own when I was in SC!) I'm hoping to run into a few friends, like Katherine Aiken, LaQuita Hutchinson and others I had gotten to know through the DEN.

This past few days (and up until this Friday) I have been training in Marion County, FL. This district has been AWESOME at implementing netTrekker. They were quick to schedule their 8 days of training, printed out the letters for each school to send home with the students with their universal log in, and are working on other promotional items as I write to help promote the use of netTrekker in their school. Implementation strategies can really make or break a product and I firmly believe that Marion will be top users of netTrekker. Professional Development is always important, so it's equally great that they scheduled so many sessions to make sure that their teachers were trained.

One teacher yesterday admitted that they were a bit skeptical about why they were in training on a search engine from 8:30-3:30. How hard could it be to search? We do it everyday with Google or Yahoo. Well once we got into it they realized that netTrekker is OH SO MUCH MORE than a search. The tools that are involved to help with differentiated instruction and for other integration possibilities really make netTrekker a great tool for the classroom.

We did look at possibly adding a quiz to their save searches. Since they don't have unitedstreaming we looked at 4Teachers.org's Quiz Star. This use to be a free tool, but now you can only get a 60 day free trial and then you have to pay for it. At least RubiStar is still free.